Made for Japan

This week, a specially sanitized version of “Pearl Harbor” opens in Japan. The Disney war movie comes complete with publicity brochures calling it “Pearl Harbor, Love in Tokyo.”

We’re not naive enough to expect historical accuracy from Hollywood, nor are we shocked that a studio wants to maximize profits. But portraying the Tokyo militarists as a bunch of peace-loving leaders pushed into war by U.S. economic sanctions--and excising a speech in the Japanese version about America’s victory--isn’t just getting a few details wrong. It’s blatant revisionism. As Japan experiences a new wave of nationalism and discusses abolishing Article 9 of its peace constitution, which renounces maintaining armed forces, the stakes are becoming higher.

Japan’s refusal to confront its aggressive past is hardly breaking news. Unlike Germany, Japan has failed to accept real responsibility for war crimes. Instead, it has seized upon the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to portray itself as a victim. Periodically, Japan issues halfhearted apologies to China or South Korea, but it has never come clean on issues such as the “comfort women” or the executions, germ warfare and medical experiments the army perpetrated in China.

In recent years, matters have only worsened. The new prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, is planning to make a public visit to the Yakusuni Shrine in Tokyo, the resting place of ashes of military dead--including war criminals’. The movie “Pride” depicted the Tokyo trial of the Japanese wartime leadership as a kangaroo court. The cartoonist Yoshinori Kobayashi has written a best-seller that dismisses the notion that atrocities took place. A new textbook for schoolchildren says much the same thing, and many teachers don’t teach anything about the war. New books such as Herbert P. Bix’s Pulitzer Prize-winning exposure of Emperor Hirohito’s deep involvement in the war cannot find Japanese publishers.

No, Japan is not about to return to 1930s-style fanaticism, but a motley crew of government bureaucrats, professors, novelists and violent youths has managed to stymie a reckoning with the country’s past. A summer movie does not create a revisionist movement, but it can give comfort to those who would.